Laurie Johnson joined a pen-pal program this summer and made a connection with a woman in London.

Photo By Nick de la Torre

Laurie Johnson's stationary and cards she's collected from her new pen pals.

Anna Marie Smith made a New Year's resolution to write and send at least one letter a week. A real letter, with a stamp and everything.

Since January, the 26-year-old - who left Houston last month for graduate school in New York - has made an effort to write letters to her grandmother and send cards and notes to her friends. For Smith, it's an act of devotion.

"I think letter-writing is a way to show people who are important in your life that they are important," Smith said. "It's powerful in a way that chatting on the phone or emailing are not."

In an age of instant communication, mobile technology and email have supplanted stationery and stamps. Personal mail has declined steadily for the past 25 years, according to U.S. Postal Service surveys. American households received an average of 0.46 personal letters each week in 1987 - roughly a letter every other week. By 2010, that had dropped to 0.14, a letter every seven or eight weeks. The post office can't pay its bills, and six-day-a-week mail delivery may be the first casualty of its mounting debt.

Yet some young and tech-savvy people are falling in love with mail; they're opting for ink over email, paragraphs instead of 140-character tweets. They crave communication that isn't quick, messages that can't be dashed off thoughtlessly and disposed of with a delete button.

"In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs," Kowal urged her readers. Several publications picked up her idea, including the New York Times, the Guardian and the website the Hairpin (www.thehairpin.com).

The Hairpin's readers - primarily young women - became inspired. Reader Lindsey Palka, 24, suggested a "Pin Pals" program, and when she offered to pair readers, more than 1,300 replied almost immediately. Since then, people from all 50 states and more than 35 countries - about 2,000 in all - have emailed Palka. Most of them are women ages 28 to 40, plus "a strong contingent of kids who are in college," she said.

"I had a pen pal when I was about 12," she said. "I think most girls my age did - it was the thing to do."

That was in the early '90s, before everybody started signing up for AOL.

"I remember back when I first started using email," said Johnson, who lives in Houston. "It was exciting - you got an email from a friend and it was cool. Over time, it's become a task: 'Oh, I've got to check my email.' "

That's why Kathy Zadrozny and Donovan Beeson founded the national Letter Writers Alliance in 2007. When the women sold their handmade stationery at craft fairs, customers would approach the booth and wistfully say, "I don't write letters anymore. I don't have anybody to write to."

The women realized that "writing letters is a solitary art," Zadrozny said, and formed the alliance to help letter writers find each other. Most of the group's 2,800 card-carrying members are female and between 24 and 55.

Letter-writing is a change from the instant communication we're all used to, Zadrozny said.

"We never have to wait for an answer to something," she said. "We're so used to an instant answer. With a letter, you have to force yourself to be slow."

Amanda Kay Martin, 29, signed up to be a Hairpin "Pin Pal" in June and now exchanges letters with a guy her age in Chicago. The slowness of their friendship appeals to her; they're getting to know each other the way we all used to, before social media created shortcuts.

"I could have simply sent him my Facebook URL and he could have known all about me from that," said Martin, who lives in Baytown. But she wanted to build a connection the old-fashioned way - by revealing her life slowly and naturally.

"I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't look her up on Facebook or Google her," Lenardic said. "It's been tempting. I started to type her name a couple of times, but I stopped myself."

She's determined to keep the relationship on paper. Once you connect online, it's hard to go back to snail mail.

Lenardic remembers writing to her cousin Pam when they were kids. They lived in different states, but the letters flew back and forth for years.

"We just wrote frantically all the time," mailing off envelopes decorated with stickers, Lenardic said.

Now that they're adults, the women still send each other the occasional postcard or gift. But these days, Lenardic acknowledged, "it's mostly texting and Facebooking."

Amanda Andriola, 25, joined an online site called Postcrossing to exchange postcards with people all over the world. In just a couple of years, she has sent more than 800 postcards and collected about 1,000.

"I've actually gotten a few pen pals, too," Andriola said. When recipients like her cards, they'll sometimes want to keep in touch - and that means sending letters and packages through the mail.

Opening the mailbox has become exciting, Andriola said. Each postcard is different, with pictures and stamps and handwritten messages from people all over the world.

"It's fun to know that it came from somewhere," said Andriola, who has lived in Houston all her life. "I can't travel, but this card, for a dollar, traveled from here to there."